Kaizen at Ninja Forge

Many of you have probably heard the term 'Kaizen', it has been made relatively famous by being the internal motto of the Toyota Motor Company, and literally means 'Good Change' in Japanese but is more correctly interpreted as 'Continuous Development'.

As part of their Kaizen practices, Toyota insists that every single time there is a problem in the marketplace as a result of something to do with their manufacturing, the team analyzing the problem must put in place countermeasures for future production lines to prevent or at least reduce the problem.

Where many companies would try to hide, ignore or reject a problem as not their fault, Toyota investigation teams aren't allowed to sign off on a problem until countermeasures are in place, or at least recommended.

On top of that every production team must regularly submit at least one recommendation a year for improvements to their section of the production process.

It is this continuous requirement for progress, improvement and development that has made Toyota arguably the top Car manufacturer today.

Here at Ninja Forge we felt it was time that we started to improve our own products in the same way.

In a discussion amongst our developers, being the great team that they are, everyone felt that we had room to grow and wanted to not just be good enough to get by as so many extension developers are, but to be the best.

As a result of those discussions we committed ourselves to a compulsory report from each of our staff every month as one of their requirements to getting paid.

We felt it in line with our spirit of openness to share these reports every month with our members and potential members, so they can see how we are working towards constantly growing and improving our services and products.